Workshop: Planning Process Trials for Equity 

Workshop Summary

The Challenge: Participants were assigned to various roles within a fictitious community and agency and asked to develop an equitable planning process resulting in a prioritized list of projects. 

The Advice: An expert panel provided guidance to participants for consideration in developing their plans. 

• “Name and articulate the complexities and tradeoffs…challenge yourselves to look for hidden barriers.” Megan Ryerson

• “Nobody likes surprises…but we can’t plan for everything. It’s about managing expectations and how to communicate with a variety of people that come from different places.” Brian Lee

• “Think about power and redistribution of power as a core tenant of equitable outcomes. Think about how we can move from performative examples to authentic outcomes.” C. Sequoia Erasmus

• “It’s messy but if we do it right, it will challenge a lot of the structures. Let go of the ego and understand that I am in service.” C. Sequoia Erasmus

The Process: Participants first developed a high level approach to the planning process for their respective communities and particular given situations. In addition to the provided roles assigned to them, people also brought their real-life experiences to the table.  In role playing the implementation of that plan, disruptive incidents were distributed, and the groups then had to assess how/if to pivot from their original plan. 

The Takeaways: Groups were then asked to report out on their results. Universal themes included incorporating equity at the beginning of the process and creating buy-in and effective communication internally and externally.

• Obstacles

  • Staff burden/backlash and resources required for extensive community outreach from the beginning and throughout a planning process.

  • Equitable projects might not align with political priorities and electability. 

  • Easy to lose focus on equity and goals when you are deep in the planning process, especially when the disruptive incidents occurred.

  • Rapid shifts in community demographics challenge how to reconcile impacts.  

• Potential Solutions and Considerations

  • Front-loading the right resources, especially in community outreach and engagement, and development of guiding principles might lead to staff buy-in if they are invested from the beginning. 

  • Developing equity-driven guiding principles that are integrated throughout the process, such as crafting a board-approved mission statement, a collaboratively developed common framework for incorporating equity, and/or an initial needs assessment. These guiding principles and priorities can help focus an agency during the disruptive moments that inevitably won’t last that long. 

  • Conducting a retrospective study to look at the history of communities, their funding levels, and their outcomes could provide context and focus on equitable distribution. 

  • Seeking feedback from the communities on project effectiveness, proposed goals, and performance measures.

  • Considering secondary effects of policies and investments to better anticipate community demographic shifts and beneficiaries.

  • Leveraging the unanticipated disruptive incidents to bring communities along the planning process, especially with engagement from the beginning, focusing on building trust with transparency of the challenges. The outreach and engagement efforts may shift from a listening-perspective to a “please understand our situation and our constraints” perspective. 

  • Incorporating flexibility and building a process where you can intentionally go back would allow an agency to spot problems and change along the way. It’s hard to know where your blind spots are, or what they are going to be, especially as the needs of a community changes. Unanticipated impacts can happen and you need to be able to revisit.

Another takeaway is the contextual nature of equity. It’s hard to define, it’s hard to quantify, it’s hard to achieve. In one example of such subjectivity, a participant noted that everyone can make an argument about why their project is equitable, but it is not binary. How can we set up a process to help understand the spectrum of equitability and evaluate from there? 

Summary Compiled by Michelle Bina (🙏)

Scenarios

Here are the [fictional] towns and regions that teams worked within – click for the full packet including the various character roles and secrets agendas!

Agenda

1:25 – Get situated

🪧Pick out your role

🔍 find your team 

👋 introduce yourself

1:35 – Overview

🗺️Workshop Overview (Moderator)

💡Panel Ideas to Consider (Panel)

📜 Team Instructions

2:00 –Process Design

✍️Led by each DOT Commissioner, Teams design a planning and project prioritization process that they believe will better reflect equity considerations than the status quo and summarize their process on a single “slide” (flip chart page).

💬Teams have the opportunity to discuss their process with panel members for comments and refinement.

2:40 – Process Testing/Implementation

🎭Team members assume assigned roles and act them out as directed, documenting the outcomes.

3:30 – Reflection

💭Teams internally reflect on their planning process and how it did/didn’t work as planned / what they would improve (pluses + deltas)

🤔Commissioners present their results to the Panel, which discusses feedback.

💬Group discussion about what we could bring to the real world

Who's Involved?

Aside from you, here's who is working on this Workshop.

General Organizers: Aditi Misra, UC-Denver; Elizabeth Sall, UrbanLabs LLC; Tierra Bills, UCLA

Scenario Development

• Michael Hyland, UC-Irvine

• Collin Yarborough, SMU 

• Charlotte Frei, Teton County

• Michelle Bina, Cambridge Systematics

• Cathy LaFata, HDR

• Laurel Paget-Seekins

Discussant Panel

• Alex Karner, Associate Professor UT Austin

• C. Sequoia Erasmus, Associate Deputy Director for Equity + Engagement,  California Transportation Commission 

• Brian Lee, Program Manager of Data Solutions and Research, Puget Sound Regional Council 

• Megan Ryerson, UPS Chair of Transportation and Professor, University of Pennsylvania